The Trumpeter Swan eBook

I

The Country Club was, as Judge Bannister had been
the first to declare, “an excrescence.”

Under the old regime, there had been no need for country
clubs. The houses on the great estates had been
thrown open for the county families and their friends.
There had been meat and drink for man and beast.

The servant problem had, however, in these latter
days, put a curb on generous impulse. There were
no more niggers underfoot, and hospitality was necessarily
curtailed. The people who at the time of the August
Horse Show had once packed great hampers with delicious
foods, and who had feasted under the trees amid all
the loveliness of mellow-tinted hills, now ordered
by telephone a luncheon of cut-and-dried courses, and
motored down to eat it. After that, they looked
at the horses, and with the feeling upon them of the
futility of such shows yawned a bit. In due season,
they held, the horse would be as extinct as the Dodo,
and as mythical as the Centaur.

The Judge argued hotly for the things which had been.
Love of the horse was bred in the bone of Old Dominion
men. He swore by all the gods that when he had
to part with his bays and ride behind gasoline, he
would be ready to die.

Becky agreed with her grandfather. She adored
the old traditions, and she adored the Judge.
She spent two months of every year with him in his
square brick house in Albemarle surrounded by unprofitable
acres. The remaining two months of her vacation
were given to her mother’s father, Admiral Meredith,
whose fortune had come down to him from whale-hunting
ancestors. The Admiral lived also in a square
brick house, but it had no acres, for it was on the
Main Street of Nantucket town, with a Captain’s
walk on top, and a spiral staircase piercing its middle.

The other eight months of the year Becky had spent
at school in an old convent in Georgetown. She
was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the Nantucket
grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge
Bannister was High Church, and it was his wife’s
Presbyterianism which had been handed down to Becky.
Religion had therefore nothing to do with her residence
at the school. A great many of the Bannister girls
had been educated at convents, and when a Bannister
had done a thing once it was apt to be done again.

Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just
over. She knew nothing of men, she knew nothing
indeed of life. The world was to her an open
sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell
of dreams.

“If anybody,” said Judge Bannister, on
the first day of the Horse Show, “thinks I am
going to eat dabs of things at the club when I can
have Mandy to cook for me, they think wrong.”

He gave orders, therefore, which belonged to more
opulent days, when his father’s estate had swarmed
with blacks. There was now in the Judge’s
household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband.
Mandy sat up half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin
killed chickens at dawn, and dressed them, and pounded
the dough for biscuits on a marble slab, and helped
his wife with the mayonnaise.